Shipborne Stabilization Grasping Low-Altitude Drones Method for UAV-Assisted Landing Dock Stations

Shipborne UAV-assisted dock is an important way to recover unmanned systems for remote water surface low-altitude detection. The lack of resisting deck disturbances capability for UAV autonomous landing in dynamic dock stations has led to the inability of traditional hovering recovery methods for single UAV guidance and flight attitude control systems to meet the growing demand for landing assistance. In this work, we present a shipborne manipulator arm designed for grasping drones that utilize low-altitude visual servo to land on the water surface. The shipborne manipulator arm is fabricated as a key component of a seaplane drone dock comprising a ship-type embedded drone storage, a packaged helistop for power transfer and UAV recovery, and a multi-degree-of-freedom arm integrated multi-source information sensors for the treatment of air to a water-related airplane crash. Dynamics model tests have demonstrated that the end-effector of the shipborne manipulator arm stabilizes and performs optimally for water surface disturbances. A down-to-top grasp docking paradigm for a UAV-assisted perching on shipborne helistop that enables the charging components of the station system to be equipped automatically to ensure that the drone performs its mission in the best condition is also presented. The efficacy of this grasp paradigm when compared with a previous top-to-down model without power recovery has been verified by retrieving vessels in the military fields.